Short guide to making a black and white icon including text and, briefly, textures.
In GIMP, but definitely translatable.
; 
.
THIS IS A GUIDE. I'm showing you the process of how I made this and how you can make something like it. I am NOT showing you how to make this exact thing, so don't ask me for exact number inputs and God help me, don't ask for a PSD. :|
Also? Text heavy. No images beyond this point.
Obviously, the first step is to start with your base, which we can see up there. :D Maybe I'll talk a little bit about the crop? This is a pivotal scene in the anime Haibane Renmei; our main character, Rakka, is lost and alone and doesn't know what to do. I could have focused on her face, which I experimented with, but I found the detail in her face to be lacking and even a bit cartoonish, taking away from the dark look I wanted. As well, when I picked the cap out to start with, I had been very drawn to the foliage on her left side. I decided to follow my gut instinct and make it the focal point of the cap, allowing the shadowy look of the leaves contrasted with the innocence of Rakka's wings and halo to communicate the feeling of my icon.
Got through that all right? Good! XD So what does this mean for you? Find the part of your image that just draws you in: this can be a face, movement or just some obscure yet compelling thing towards the side of the picture. Most of the time, I'd say, it's the essence of that photograph or that scene. Trust your own personal vision of what you create.
1. Now this is the first official step! I flirted with the idea of coloring this, mostly because I feel like I make way too many black and white icons, but the starkness of it just called out to me. There are many ways to do this, as you may know, and my "way" is through gradient maps (Image > Adjustments > Gradient Map). For this to work properly, you should have some shade of black set as the foreground color and white as the background color. I say "shade" because I've been known to experiment with lighter blacks, which is also what I happened to use on this particular icon, so maybe give that a try if you don't always like the bold look of just plain old #000000 and #FFFFFF together. After that, play around with Curves, Levels and Brightness/Contrast to achieve just how much darkness and lightness you want in your icon (all can be found under Image > Adjustments). I'm not here to tell you what you should create, and there are a lot of options, so have fun with it!
2. Speaking of fun, I got curious about the inverted look here, as you might have been able to tell from the finished product~ There was just a challenge at
iconplay where you had to use something like that in your icon, which I found incredibly interesting, and I entered this. It's a wonderful community, on that note, so check it out if you're interested in challenging yourself! I guess it was still on my mind, so just to see, I duplicated my layer and inverted it (Image > Adjustments > Invert). It's important to make a new layer here because then you can easily edit or delete it, whereas if you just do it on your background layer, you might be stuck with it or destroy work you've already done. It's also important for what I ended up doing: I really liked how the leaves turned white and thought it would look cool mixed with the black that was already there, so I took a soft round brush and erased everything except the edges where the leaves were. Maybe a little unnecessary, but I thought it kind of added to the creepy effect I was after — it's my icon, it stays if I like it, haha! I did think it didn't blend well enough, so I left the layer on top, went into Curves and started dragging the lines down to give the leaves a grayer color. Once I was satisfied, I flattened the layers (Layer > Flatten Image).
Now that everything is on the same background layer, you can continue to play with the coloring if you're still unsatisfied with it. I know it took me a long time just to settle on that alone, so don't be afraid to keep messing with it. Eventually you'll get what you want and eventually it's gonna bend to your will, so don't give up 'til you get it! You may even discover something you like more than what you originally had in mind.
3. Text seems to be something a lot of people have trouble with, including me, though I've been improving. I don't even really like it on this icon, but I knew that I wanted that exact phrase there, so I worked with it and got to something I was alright with. I may have also just been staring at this icon for way too long, because I liked it before... XD Either way, text is going to be very difficult for some, so if you're not particularly attached to what you're trying to put on the icon, I would suggest that you do without it. An icon with bad text is going to look worse than an icon with no text, and in a lot of cases, people prefer the textless versions more. I put each line on a separate layer so I could arrange them more nicely and rotated each one for... dramatic effect?! I brought the opacity down some and blurred the layers just a little for a more hushed look, but it's up to you if you want to do any of these things or not.
4. Textures are fun! There are a lot of them on this icon just because I couldn't make up my mind, but most of them don't make a very big difference, so I'm focusing on the obvious ones. They are here and here, both from
noisettee's #25 set, and both are set to multiply at seventy or eighty-something percent. Somewhere around there, but it's all about what looks good on your icon. I liked these textures because they reminded me of those gnarled tree branches you see in forests, and our Rakka is unfortunately stuck in one, so they felt like the perfect fit to me. I always do a lot of modifications to the textures I use (don't know if that's proper texture etiquette or not?), so for these two, I rotated them and erased the parts that were useless or in the way. Move them into every nook and cranny of your icon until you find the perfect spot! When it all finally comes together, it's amazing what textures can do for your icons, because they add what you can't get from simple coloring techniques. texturize is an amazing resource for finding textures to use.
Those are the basics and they should get you started! Let me know if you've got questions and I'll do my best to help you. Otherwise, leave me a comment and let me know that you enjoyed it! Or didn't enjoy it.
PLEASE, IF I ASK YOU FOR NOTHING ELSE IN LIFE, PLEASE COMMENT AT MY JOURNAL. Thank you!!
THIS IS A GUIDE. I'm showing you the process of how I made this and how you can make something like it. I am NOT showing you how to make this exact thing, so don't ask me for exact number inputs and God help me, don't ask for a PSD. :|
Also? Text heavy. No images beyond this point.
Obviously, the first step is to start with your base, which we can see up there. :D Maybe I'll talk a little bit about the crop? This is a pivotal scene in the anime Haibane Renmei; our main character, Rakka, is lost and alone and doesn't know what to do. I could have focused on her face, which I experimented with, but I found the detail in her face to be lacking and even a bit cartoonish, taking away from the dark look I wanted. As well, when I picked the cap out to start with, I had been very drawn to the foliage on her left side. I decided to follow my gut instinct and make it the focal point of the cap, allowing the shadowy look of the leaves contrasted with the innocence of Rakka's wings and halo to communicate the feeling of my icon.
Got through that all right? Good! XD So what does this mean for you? Find the part of your image that just draws you in: this can be a face, movement or just some obscure yet compelling thing towards the side of the picture. Most of the time, I'd say, it's the essence of that photograph or that scene. Trust your own personal vision of what you create.
1. Now this is the first official step! I flirted with the idea of coloring this, mostly because I feel like I make way too many black and white icons, but the starkness of it just called out to me. There are many ways to do this, as you may know, and my "way" is through gradient maps (Image > Adjustments > Gradient Map). For this to work properly, you should have some shade of black set as the foreground color and white as the background color. I say "shade" because I've been known to experiment with lighter blacks, which is also what I happened to use on this particular icon, so maybe give that a try if you don't always like the bold look of just plain old #000000 and #FFFFFF together. After that, play around with Curves, Levels and Brightness/Contrast to achieve just how much darkness and lightness you want in your icon (all can be found under Image > Adjustments). I'm not here to tell you what you should create, and there are a lot of options, so have fun with it!
2. Speaking of fun, I got curious about the inverted look here, as you might have been able to tell from the finished product~ There was just a challenge at
iconplay where you had to use something like that in your icon, which I found incredibly interesting, and I entered this. It's a wonderful community, on that note, so check it out if you're interested in challenging yourself! I guess it was still on my mind, so just to see, I duplicated my layer and inverted it (Image > Adjustments > Invert). It's important to make a new layer here because then you can easily edit or delete it, whereas if you just do it on your background layer, you might be stuck with it or destroy work you've already done. It's also important for what I ended up doing: I really liked how the leaves turned white and thought it would look cool mixed with the black that was already there, so I took a soft round brush and erased everything except the edges where the leaves were. Maybe a little unnecessary, but I thought it kind of added to the creepy effect I was after — it's my icon, it stays if I like it, haha! I did think it didn't blend well enough, so I left the layer on top, went into Curves and started dragging the lines down to give the leaves a grayer color. Once I was satisfied, I flattened the layers (Layer > Flatten Image).
Now that everything is on the same background layer, you can continue to play with the coloring if you're still unsatisfied with it. I know it took me a long time just to settle on that alone, so don't be afraid to keep messing with it. Eventually you'll get what you want and eventually it's gonna bend to your will, so don't give up 'til you get it! You may even discover something you like more than what you originally had in mind.
3. Text seems to be something a lot of people have trouble with, including me, though I've been improving. I don't even really like it on this icon, but I knew that I wanted that exact phrase there, so I worked with it and got to something I was alright with. I may have also just been staring at this icon for way too long, because I liked it before... XD Either way, text is going to be very difficult for some, so if you're not particularly attached to what you're trying to put on the icon, I would suggest that you do without it. An icon with bad text is going to look worse than an icon with no text, and in a lot of cases, people prefer the textless versions more. I put each line on a separate layer so I could arrange them more nicely and rotated each one for... dramatic effect?! I brought the opacity down some and blurred the layers just a little for a more hushed look, but it's up to you if you want to do any of these things or not.
4. Textures are fun! There are a lot of them on this icon just because I couldn't make up my mind, but most of them don't make a very big difference, so I'm focusing on the obvious ones. They are here and here, both from
noisettee's #25 set, and both are set to multiply at seventy or eighty-something percent. Somewhere around there, but it's all about what looks good on your icon. I liked these textures because they reminded me of those gnarled tree branches you see in forests, and our Rakka is unfortunately stuck in one, so they felt like the perfect fit to me. I always do a lot of modifications to the textures I use (don't know if that's proper texture etiquette or not?), so for these two, I rotated them and erased the parts that were useless or in the way. Move them into every nook and cranny of your icon until you find the perfect spot! When it all finally comes together, it's amazing what textures can do for your icons, because they add what you can't get from simple coloring techniques. texturize is an amazing resource for finding textures to use.Those are the basics and they should get you started! Let me know if you've got questions and I'll do my best to help you. Otherwise, leave me a comment and let me know that you enjoyed it! Or didn't enjoy it.
PLEASE, IF I ASK YOU FOR NOTHING ELSE IN LIFE, PLEASE COMMENT AT MY JOURNAL. Thank you!!